Refreshing renovation gets former owner approval

For more than a century, a tiny Chinatown home housed countless members of the Brunet family. When the time came to let go, it found a new family and got a major facelift. As Paula McCooey discovers, the Brunets approve.

Marc Kappinga restored an 1874 home he purchased from the only other family to ever own it. Here, he sits with his wife Rosalie in the new living room.

Photograph by: Wayne Cuddington
, The Ottawa Citizen

In a city where replacing tiny, aging houses with large infills is as common as dodgy weather during Winterlude, Marc Kappinga offers a refreshingly different story.

Our tale begins in 1874, when then-Bytown resident Joseph Brunet built the first house on what is now Upper Lorne Avenue, off Somerset Street West, for $700. That was 10 years before the monastery was built next door.

For more than a century — 132 years to be exact — three generations of the Brunet family would live in the 800-square-foot, three-bedroom home. Extended family lived nearby and would gather at the Brunet home every Sunday after mass.

Christmas and New Year's saw the cosy home bursting with adults and children revelling, playing games, enjoying home-cooked meals. The Depression meant tough times and the Brunet family's resources were pooled, with some children sleeping three or four to a bedroom.

During that century-plus stretch, the house weathered everything from flying hockey pucks launched from the rink next door to the Great Fire of 1900 that levelled most of Hull and nearby LeBreton Flats. The pucks merely left dents in the siding; the fire was a more dramatic event. On that spring morning, northerly winds blew billowing smoke and carried scorching embers across the Ottawa River. The fire took hold of LeBreton Flats and started to climb the cliff at the base of Upper Lorne, prompting the Dominican priests next door to decide it would take an act of God to quell the disaster.

"To stop the fire, the priests went outside the church on the escarpment and blessed the territory so the fire would not come up the hill," says Paul Brunet, nephew of Adrienne Brunet, the final Brunet family member to own the home. He says the family asked the priests to bless their house as well. "We are on the cliff and the fire stopped at the bottom of the cliff." But it still left its mark, scorching some of the siding.

Adrienne Brunet, the great-granddaughter of builder Joseph, was born in the house and lived there all her life. But the elderly woman, who never married, she started to struggle with the stairs to her bedroom and knew it was time to move on to assisted living. Her nephews discussed buying the home, but they had their own places and were not confident they could commit to the work required to restore the property. So, in 2006, she put the home up for sale.

Kappinga, who was a real estate agent at the time, caught wind of the listing and loved the potential of the home so much that he bought it the same day. He and his wife, Rosalie, became just the second family to own the 19th-century charmer.

Kappinga spent two years restoring it, then teamed up with architect Paul Kariouk (kariouk.com) to build a 1,200-square-foot addition at the back, cantilevered over the driveway. The entire project took more than four years. Kappinga acted as contractor and, given the enormity of the work, he left his job in real estate to build the addition full time.

He had hoped to have Adrienne Brunet see the final result, but she never got the chance. Brunet died in December, right around the time Kappinga finished the home. So he extended the invitation to her family.

On a Saturday morning in January, Brunet's nephews and their families gathered to see the transformation of their childhood haunt.

"There's no way we can express our appreciation," says nephew Guy Brunet. "And commenting on the work, it's beyond words. This was our second home for many many years. I'm just happy we were able to come and visit."

Gone was the tiny farm-like kitchen where they once ate chips and cookies with their aunt, replaced by an open kitchen with a large Caesarstone island counter in a modern, bright green apple.

Rosalie Kappinga says the island colour was such a unique request for Emerald Tile & Marble (emeraldtile.ca) that the owner personally supervised the installation. "He wanted to make sure (we were) serious about the colour because he had never had anyone ask for it ... and he wanted to take a photograph of it for his showroom."

Checking out the addition upstairs, Paul Brunet, now 64, was impressed.

"What a change — and a good change," he says, noticing the 10-foot ceilings and open maple tread stairs that lead to a rooftop garden and patio. "And we are just glad that somebody appreciated the house, rather than level it and rebuild something else."

Kappinga repurposed so much of the materials of the original home that he only had a single container of waste at the end of the project — the old kitchen cabinets were moved to what is now the dining room, where he built a custom hutch and an old chicken coop and shed at the back became a family room. He refinished the tongue-and-groove walls and ceilings in the living and dining rooms and salvaged the scorched siding, turning it into flooring for the addition that still shows remnants of black soot embedded into the boards.

Building restrictions prevented Kappinga and Kariouk from adding large windows on the side of the addition, so they went with transom-style windows in the second-floor den and master bedroom. To draw in the most light, Kariouk designed a large skylight in the ceiling of the master ensuite and bathroom walls are constructed of tempered glass, although it does reduce privacy.

As the Kappingas wrapped up their tour, the Brunets said they were happy to know their childhood haunt would be appreciated and well lived in.

To which Guy Brunet chimed in with a smile: "So what time do you want us here on Christmas Day?"

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